Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Introduction: Literary Historiography, the Canon, and the Rest
- Part I Poetry
- Part II The Novel
- Difficulties of a Statesman: Johann Michael von Loen and Der redliche Mann am Hofe
- Expanding the Eighteenth-Century Novel between England and Germany: Sentiment, Experience, and the Self
- An Unoriginal Modernity: The Novelist-Translator Friedrich von Oertel
- Part III Drama and Theater
- Part IV Philosophy and Criticism
- Notes on the Contributors
Difficulties of a Statesman: Johann Michael von Loen and Der redliche Mann am Hofe
from Part II - The Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Introduction: Literary Historiography, the Canon, and the Rest
- Part I Poetry
- Part II The Novel
- Difficulties of a Statesman: Johann Michael von Loen and Der redliche Mann am Hofe
- Expanding the Eighteenth-Century Novel between England and Germany: Sentiment, Experience, and the Self
- An Unoriginal Modernity: The Novelist-Translator Friedrich von Oertel
- Part III Drama and Theater
- Part IV Philosophy and Criticism
- Notes on the Contributors
Summary
MOST READERS WHO KNOW the name of Johann Michael von Loen probably encounter it first in the autobiography of his greatnephew, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Früher, und von mir kaum noch mit Augen gesehen, machte Johann Michael von Loen in der literarischen Welt so wie in Frankfurt ziemliches Aufsehen…. Er schrieb den Grafen von Rivera, einen didaktischen Roman, dessen Inhalt aus dem zweiten Titel: oder der ehrliche Mann am Hofe, ersichtlich ist. Dieses Werk wurde gut aufgenommen, weil es auch von den Höfen, wo sonst nur Klugheit zu Hause ist, Sittlichkeit verlangte; und so brachte ihm seine Arbeit Beifall und Ansehen.
[Earlier—so early that I scarcely set eyes upon him—Johann Michael von Loen had considerable repute in the literary world, as well as at Frankfurt…. He wrote the Count of Rivera, a didactic novel, whose content is clear from the second title, or, the Honest Man at Court. This work was well received, because it insisted on morality in the affairs of courts, where prudence usually dominates; thus his work brought him both applause and respect.]
Although Goethe gets the title wrong, Der redliche Mann am Hofe; Oder die Begebenheiten des Grafens von Rivera (The Honest Man at Court; or The Deeds of Count von Rivera, 1740) was in its day a much-read work that went through a further five impressions (1742, 1751, 1752, 1760, 1771). Ironically, it is the only work for which its author is now remembered, although he was an extremely copious writer on all manner of subjects.
Born in Frankfurt in 1694, and descended from a Dutch mercantile family, Loen was a Calvinist. As a member of the Reformed religion, he was excluded from public office in the Lutheran city of Frankfurt. He studied law first at Marburg and later at the recently founded University of Halle, where between 1712 and 1715 he listened to some of the leading philosophers and legal thinkers of the time, including Christian Wolff and Christian Thomasius. After six months’ employment at the Reichskammergericht in Wetzlar (1715–16), where his great-nephew would follow him sixty years later, Loen traveled widely throughout Europe, from Paris to Prague, and visited a number of princely courts, thus gathering experience that would feed into his numerous political treatises as well as into his novel.
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- Information
- Edinburgh German Yearbook 12 , pp. 71 - 89Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018